Behind Moon Travel Goal, Big Talk and Little Money

By KENNETH CHANG

Published: August 25, 2009

Forty years after it first landed men on the Moon, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has little chance of repeating that accomplishment by the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.

Maybe not even by the 60th.

Five years after NASA was given a goal of returning to the Moon by 2020, the agency is arriving at an uncomfortable realization -- that the American human spaceflight program might not accomplish anything new anytime soon.

''Unless the president is willing to step up and take a bold step like President Kennedy did, the manned spaceflight program is going to go in the ditch,'' said Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida.

NASA's current plan is to retire the space shuttles by September of next year after completing construction of the International Space Station, then rely on Russian rockets until a next-generation rocket, the Ares I, is ready in March 2015. The agency would then retire and dispose of the space station in 2016 and use the freed-up money to develop the heavy-lift Ares V rocket, a lunar lander and the technology for building a Moon settlement.

That plan grew out of the ''vision for space exploration'' that President George W. Bush announced in January 2004, a year after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its seven astronauts. But in his budget requests, President Bush never asked for as much money as the Moon vision called for, and Congress, despite bipartisan expressions of support for the program, never added the money. President Obama's budget request for the next fiscal year, which starts in October, outlined further cuts in 2011 and beyond.

In the last couple of months, a blue-ribbon panel convened by the Obama administration reached two points of broad consensus. One was that it made little sense to spend 10 years building the space station and then throw it away after only 5 years of operation. The second was at that at present financing levels, about $100 billion for human spaceflight in the decade from 2010 to 2020, the current program was, in the panel's words, ''not executable.''

In fact, NASA might not reach the Moon's surface even by 2030, the panel concluded. Extending the life of the space station diverted even more money from the Moon efforts. Meeting the current goal of getting back to the Moon by 2020 might require an additional $50 billion.

No alternative plan fits the budget, either, the panel said. ''Our view is that it will be difficult with the current budget to do anything that's terribly inspiring in the human spaceflight area,'' Norman Augustine, a former chief executive of Lockheed Martin and the panel's chairman, said during its last public meeting on Aug. 12.

Now almost everything about NASA's human spaceflight endeavors is again in question -- the rockets, the budget, the schedule, the destination -- and another overhaul could follow.

The changes could be radical: scuttling the Ares I rocket that NASA has spent $3 billion developing over the past four years and turning some or all of the space transportation business to private companies. Yet the review has attracted little attention beyond space enthusiasts and politicians with perhaps more parochial concerns -- thousands of jobs in the electoral tipping point of Florida, for instance.

''I think that a lot of people care about space a little bit,'' said Bob Werb, chairman of the Space Frontier Foundation, an organization that advocates the settlement of space. ''But it's only a key issue for a small percentage of the population. It's been stated that the support for space is a mile wide and an inch deep, and there's a lot of truth to that.''

A Web site set up for the panel received only 1,500 comments as of the end of July. The question, ''What do you find most compelling about NASA's human space flight activities and why?'' generated just 147 responses.

''The American people have no idea what's going on,'' said Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona and chairwoman of the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics. ''The average American does not know the shuttle will go away at the end of 2010.''

So far, getting out of the human spaceflight business entirely does not appear to be under consideration.

As a presidential candidate last year, Mr. Obama said he supported the goal of returning to the Moon by 2020. Since becoming president, he has repeatedly said he wants NASA to be inspiring, but not what he thinks an inspiring mission would be.

With the arrival of the panel's final report, now expected in mid-September, Mr. Obama will have to make some key decisions and describe his vision for NASA.

The first decision is a stark one: whether to increase the money for the human space program to at least $130 billion over the next decade, the level the panel said would be needed, or to pull back the grander ambitions and keep astronauts to low-Earth orbit for the next couple of decades.

''That is not a choice the White House wanted,'' Ms. Giffords said.

As requested, the panel will offer several options for the administration to consider, not one particular recommendation, and all of the options include compromises like bypassing landing on the Moon and focusing on long-duration space flights, at least initially. That would save the cost of developing a lunar lander and habitat, but Ms. Giffords, for one, said she did not find that plan exciting and doubted that her constituents would either.

In addition to deciding where to go, the administration has to decide how to get there. The simplest option would be to continue the current program, but at a slower pace to fit the available financing, reaching the Moon by about 2025.

Or Mr. Obama could decide that now is the moment to kick-start the nascent commercial space business. NASA is already counting on private companies to bring up cargo to the space station after the retirement of the shuttles, but another possibility might be canceling the Ares I and turning over all transportation to and from low-Earth orbit to private enterprise.

But it is also unclear whether Congress would go along with wholesale changes. Ms. Giffords said she still supported NASA's current program and was reluctant to throw away its work. A test firing of the first stage of an Ares I engine will take place this week in Utah, and a flight test of a prototype is scheduled later in the year.

''It will cost more money,'' she said. ''It will take more time if we decide to shift gears and use another vehicle.''

PHOTO: TAKEOFF: A solid rocket booster to be tested in Utah. It is part of the Ares I rocket NASA plans to have ready in 2015.(PHOTOGRAPH BY ATK)